Roger Warner Cares for Quiet Sundays

I have to thank our local, the (brilliant) Gardener’s Arms and mega barman Rick, for helping me to rediscover music. Or, more correctly, to re-experience music.

In short, last week Gerry and I ditched iTunes as our music centre of choice and reverted to CD’s. The effects have been inspirational.

As mentioned previously, I had lost more than a little of my soul (and mind) over the past decade to all things digital – conversations lost to email, magazines lost to RSS feeds, and, of course, CDs lost to iTunes.

This blog is an attempt to get things back on track – to live life slower, reclaim my attention span, and generally devote decent time to doing all things well and properly. See here for a recap…

Anyways, back to the pub.

Rick recently introduced ‘Vinyl Orders’ (or ‘The Vinyl Bell’ or ‘The Vinyl Countdown’, depending on who you talk to) to the Gardner’s as a weekly Sunday event. The idea, of course, is for folks to bring along some old vinyl, give it a spin and generally enjoy a good old gas about music (as well as being a great excuse to get skulled on the best selection of real ale in East Sussex).

Here’s what the opening night looked like:

Now, I’d never heard of Clifton Chenier before this point. John Eccles introduced me to it – as well as to his forthright views on Cajun soul and jazz. Anyways, from what I remember Clifton Chernier is great and good fun was had by all.

Fast forward a few weeks and I returned with Gerry – AKA music Nazi – on her birthday with an armful of her old LP’s. A few pints into the evening we hear this:

I loved it and got into a bit of a chat with its (proud) owner. We were both a little worse for wear, but we shared a joke and some profound (dodgy) 80′s soul insights and moved on. At the same time it made me realise that something I used to enjoy was missing from my life.

I’d not really passed any music around with any enthusiasm for a while. In fact, I realised that Gerry and I hadn’t really shared any of our (large) collection together in the past five years – ever since we went digital. Then I realised what we were missing and what had gone wrong….

This interface is a search interface. I can browse covers, but this is a poor substitute for cradling an LP or a CD and rooting around the sleevenotes, pullouts and tracklistings. Also, unlike an album sleeve, it’s not a thing of beauty.

This interface isn’t a search interface (search really is crap on an iPod). It’s more a doing interface – an application interface. It helps you to get to the tracks you want and to play them.

iTunes and the iPod (and all their mp3 brethren) are great little interfaces for finding the stuff that you want – for searching out specifics. But as a window onto your world of music, they’re totally crap. They don’t accommodate idle browsing or encourage random acts of serendipity. They’re also extremely private – unless you and other people are connected to a Mac or PC – so they don’t inspire any real interaction with other people.

To my mind, all of these physical things represent the absolute joys of owning a music collection – and not many of them can be replicated in ones and zeros.

Here’s how and why music works best for me:

Cooking in the kitchen whilst G goes aurally AWOL on a quest for remote sea shanties


Playing top trumps with G on best film scores


Annoying G with loud inappropriate rap whilst she’s eating breakfast in the morning

Drunken collaborative DJ sets after dinner with friends

….and generally spending slow time rooting around, finding forgotten stuff, and surfing some good old waves of nostalgia

So, the day after our vinyl session at the Gardener’s I built this in our kitchen:

Which now looks like this:

And this morning I managed to dig out OutKast’s ‘The Way You Move’ (Speakerboxx/The Love Below) – a track I hadn’t heard for years, but one that right now feels like the best piece of music ever invented.

Next week the Warner household fully regresses to Phono….

Sidenote – A DISCLAIMER: Gerry warned me of this adverse effect of iTunes before iTunes was invented. She is VERY wise and I love her madly and deeply.

Footnote 1: iTunes is still part of our lives, but it’s a footnote. Useful for train journeys and cars.

Footnote 2: Dammit! I can’t find The Stone Roses. Need a better search apparatus. D’oh!